Received: from localhost (maia-1.hub.org [200.46.204.191]) by postgresql.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AE78A9FA23F for ; Mon, 27 Nov 2006 14:33:21 -0400 (AST) Received: from postgresql.org ([200.46.204.71]) by localhost (mx1.hub.org [200.46.204.191]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with ESMTP id 59867-04 for ; Mon, 27 Nov 2006 14:33:08 -0400 (AST) X-Greylist: delayed 00:20:35.759945 by SQLgrey-1.7.4 Received: from mail.enyo.de (mail.enyo.de [212.9.189.167]) by postgresql.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0CBAA9FA20E for ; Mon, 27 Nov 2006 14:33:08 -0400 (AST) Received: from deneb.vpn.enyo.de ([212.9.189.177] helo=deneb.enyo.de) by mail.enyo.de with esmtp id 1Gokxb-0008QA-MQ; Mon, 27 Nov 2006 19:12:07 +0100 Received: from fw by deneb.enyo.de with local (Exim 4.63) (envelope-from ) id 1GokxR-0000oG-38; Mon, 27 Nov 2006 19:11:57 +0100 From: Florian Weimer To: "Jim C. Nasby" Cc: Richard Troy , Tom Lane , "Craig A. James" , Richard Huxton , Russell Smith , pgsql-performance@postgresql.org Subject: Re: Postgres server crash References: <19583.1163700841@sss.pgh.pa.us> <20061126234101.GG39519@nasby.net> Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2006 19:11:57 +0100 In-Reply-To: <20061126234101.GG39519@nasby.net> (Jim C. Nasby's message of "Sun, 26 Nov 2006 17:41:02 -0600") Message-ID: <87irh03gk2.fsf@mid.deneb.enyo.de> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Virus-Scanned: Maia Mailguard 1.0.1 X-Archive-Number: 200611/245 X-Sequence-Number: 22015 * Jim C. Nasby: > What's interesting is that apparently FreeBSD also has overcommit (and > IIRC no way to disable it), yet I never hear people going off on OOM > kills in FreeBSD. My theory is that FreeBSD admins are smart enough to > dedicate a decent amount of swap space, so that by the time you got to > an OOM kill situation you'd be so far into swapping that the box would > be nearly unusable. I've seen OOM situations with our regular "use twice as much swap space as there is RAM in the machine" rule. Perhaps Linux is just paging too fast for this to work. 8-P By the way, the sysctl setting breaks some applications and programming environments, such as SBCL and CMUCL.